One of the most important things I’ve learned in my life is the importance and necessity of boundaries, both personal and professional, and I am one who will uphold those boundaries as appropriate, but I will always be looking to protect my peace. I am disabled. I am autistic and ADHD and have recovered from C-PTSD. I know my worth and I know my boundaries and 1000% will always choose protecting my peace. That means I will delete comments. I will block people. I will give the old heave ho and hearty 'shop elsewhere in the future' and if I’m feeling extra spicy you might get a screenshot of mockery. I usually reserve the latter for my Christofascist haters. They seem to go rather quiet when I thank them for boosting my algorithm and that I will 'pray to Satan for their souls.'
Social media has given us the delusion that all comments are valid and we have to accept the good and the bad and the abuse and I’m here to say that I’m not here to be abused and I will not tolerate it. As we see with the rise of bot farms and trolls with more and more of these abuse of comments are coming from such places so I have no problems blocking people on any of the Meta platforms or YouTube because I’m not only protecting myself I’m protecting my customers, clients, and subscribers from abuse
I’m not trying to throw shade at other creators, authors, and businesses for not moderating their communities when it comes to hate and abuse as such, however I often wonder why why they leave all the abusive comments up there for people to see and yes I know it falls under 'freedom of speech', but at the same time I’m protecting my peace and I don’t care what people think or say and they are free to say it. I just don’t have to listen to it. I don’t have to entertain it. It doesn't have to be part of my reality.
Allowing for such abusive commentary denotes a lack of concern for the safety of their audience. I know because I have left behind friends and colleagues for not only allowing hate and abuse, but for perpetuating it further. I am disabled. Why would I feel safe around someone allowing hateful ableist and eugenics fueled rhetoric towards disabled folks?
I’ll give you a personal example back in the what I will call the 'Great TERF off of 2019'… I had a few (former) friends who were gender essentialists, and raging TERFs to the point of any time something gender related came up in conversation on Facebook, they just had to insert the usual 'genitalia equals gender' into every conversation, regardless of whether the conversation necessitated that type of commentary. They weren’t only commenting on my page, but they were doing it to our mutual friends as well as as soon as anything remotely gender related came up. I will give you an example -- I used to create more traditional therapeutic aromatherapy, and herbal products and I had worked out some products for pregnancy related support and in doing this I wanted to use gender inclusive language on my website and I polled my friend group on Facebook for any ideas lof course this became open season for the 'genitalia equals gender' crowd to spew their two cents upon everyone.
There became a point when I realized that their behavior was abusive, and I was tolerating it. I was allowing it I was giving space for it over the harm that was being caused to my transgender and non-binary friends and finally I had to draw a line in the sand. I had to excise a few longtime friends that I was very close with, but I could not allow the space for them to continue to cause harm. I took a stand to mitigate and ameliorate the abuse and harm that was being done. And in the end, my friends expressed gratitude for calling this out and actually doing something about it. I know I don’t feel comfortable when I see someone allowing blatant racist bullshit in their comments, whether they’re arguing against it or not I do not allow my spaces to be a platform for hate and abuse.
I feel like this should not need an explanation, but it does because invariably when I see anything questioned as such it comes under the 'free speech.' Free speech does not equal freedom from consequence. If you believe that go in and tell your boss to eat shit and go fuck themselves on Monday and see if there’s any consequences to that or if they just struggle to go well free speech y’all. The point being is there is so much hate online and as part of a business, I have to navigate having social media YouTube content, blogging, etc. however, this does not mean that I need to and I am expected to be abused for it. My policy is as such if you choose to be abusive. I’m going to delete it. I’m going to block you. I may mock you in the process, but that is it, I am drawing the line in the sand. I am protecting my peace and I’m protecting the peace of those around me and there are plenty of people that allow abuse and if you want to argue with the trolls, I can’t stop you, but I can make my little corner of the Internet universe just a little more quiet a little less hostile and that’s all I got because I have healthy boundaries and I protect those boundaries and that is not going to change.